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From early in its history, cable news found the panel format — featuring people from different perspectives and disciplines — to be a lively (and cost-efficient) way to deliver opinions on current events. The discussions can be enervating, enlightening or infuriating, depending on who is on which side of the food fight. But it’s often hard to tell the reporters from the opinion slingers, especially when the panels bleed into the delivery of the news itself. News reporters bristle when critics tar them as liberal or conservative. They’re quick to insist that they have nothing to do with the opinion side of their organizations. (“We serve different masters,” Fox News anchorman Shepard Smith told Time magazine. “We work for different reporting chains, we have different rules.”) And yet panels with multiple talking heads arguably make the situation more fraught for them by lumping them with former politicians, think-tank scholars, and opinionated party hacks — a blending of news reporting and commentary that’s bound to leave some viewers confused. But the business model of 24-hour cable news may have made the coexistence and commingling of reporting and opinion a near certainty. Covering the news requires sending reporters, producers, editors and video journalists to wherever the news is happening. It’s expensive and inconvenient. Talk, on the other hand, is literally cheap. Round up a few semi-knowledgeable and telegenic types, array them around the desk, and off you go.